


How All This, And Love Too, Will Ruin Us

by biextroverts



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Break Up, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Established Relationship, F/M, Families of Choice, Post-Season/Series 04, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-06-21 02:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15547680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biextroverts/pseuds/biextroverts
Summary: Emori finds a family and loses a lover on the Ring.





	How All This, And Love Too, Will Ruin Us

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Scheherazade" by Richard Siken because infernalandmortal inspires me in everything I do. Thanks for letting me borrow your poet, Amanda.

          The moment they’ve chosen their room and locked the door safely behind them, John is pressing her up against the cold metal wall, his heartbeat rapid and his body warm against her own. He bends his head so that his lips hover just over hers, warm breath fanning across her face, and she wraps her arms around his neck, hauls herself onto her toes, so that she can meet his mouth hungrily with hers. It is a far more pleasurable running out of air, to twine her tongue with John’s, than was their earlier struggle for breath; she would choose any day to lose herself in the taste, the scent, the feel of him, rugged and lean, than to lose herself in the apartness of her radiation suit, utterly closed off from any companion but her rapidly fading mind. That had been a deprivation; this is an excess, and she leans into it, greedily, until they have to break for breath and she rests her forehead against his and he encircles her waist with his arms, drawing her closer until she can feel the arousal hard between his thighs.  
  
          “We did it,” he says when he can speak again, taking her by the hands and drawing her to the unmade bed. He lies down on his side, and she follows suit, propping herself up on one elbow to look at him. “We survived.”  
           
          “We made survivor’s moves,” she says, a smile creeping across her face. He grins almost lazily at the words and leans in to kiss her, the meeting of their upturned mouths only widening their smiles. Emori isn’t sure if this is what _safe_ feels like, but she’s willing to hazard a guess it’s the closest she’s ever gotten – her blood is warm and slow, her muscles looser than she knew muscles could be.

          “We made it, ‘Mori,” John says, kissing the tip of her nose. He squeezes her hands, gloved and ungloved alike, and brings the gloved hand to his mouth to press a kiss to it through the fabric. “Can I –?”

          She nods. He unwraps her hand delicately, almost reverently, before pressing a second kiss to the bare skin at the junction of her two fused digits. Her sensation in that hand is numb, but it still sends a pulse of fire through her just to know his mouth is there, just to know he thinks that all of her, the rough edges and the hidden parts included, is something worth loving. She can’t even find it in herself to mind that she’s become a romantic – John is singular, and what’s more, they have  _ time _ now, safe away from the perils of the Earth that kept them always running, always looking over their shoulders to make sure no one was following behind.

          “I love you,” she murmurs, and John stills. His deep blue eyes are a question – she’s said it before, but never unprompted, never without his declaring it first. She rolls on top of him and leans down to kiss the surprise from his face, long and slow, and, after a moment, his arms wrap around her, hands splayed on her back. 

          They stay like that for a while, Emori straddling John’s hips, curling her fingers through his hair, until a sharp knock on their door and Raven’s crow of “time for dinner, lovebirds!” compels her to roll off of him and get to her feet. He catches her at the door as Raven’s uneven footsteps retreat down the hall, though, encircling her waist with his arms and burying his nose in her hair, mouth at the shell of her ear. 

          “I love you too, ‘Mori.”

          She turns in his embrace, rises onto her toes to kiss him. When she pulls away, she knows she’s smirking; even if she couldn’t feel the slight, skewed upturn of her own lips, John’s amused gaze would clue her in.

          “I know.”

***

          Things settle into a certain rhythm over the course of the coming months. Bellamy leads, arbitrating any quibbles that arise and keeping their hopes all high. Raven works on the radio, attempting tirelessly to contact the bunker at Polis. Monty tends the algae farm and, when it begins to produce enough for them to live off of, takes charge of the cooking as well – John refuses to be associated with what he calls “food like that,” even more so after it takes him out for a week (Emori hovers over their bed, feeling a release better than any in her life when he struggles back to consciousness, smiling weakly at her and telling her he’d  _ said _ five years of algae salads and recycled urine were a fate worse than death; he eats cautiously for weeks afterwards, even once the formula is assuredly safe). Echo trains, teaching Raven to spar and Bellamy to fight with a sword and even giving the almost aggressively peaceful Monty a few tips on self-defense; she offers John her services as an instructor as well, but John has never been that kind of fighter, and lightly bats away Echo’s olive branch with a quip about being “more of a lover, actually” that makes Raven roll her eyes and Emori snort with laughter over their bowls of algae sludge. Harper drifts between her lover and Echo, by turns tending their sole source of sustenance and working on her punches, kicks, and knees and elbows to the ribs. And Emori does what she’s always done best – observes, hovering at Bellamy’s shoulder as he wanders the halls checking in on things, working alongside Monty to cultivate and prepare the algae for meals, studying Echo’s footwork as she and Harper run through drills, and, of course, her favorite, pulling up a seat beside Raven and watching Raven work at trying to fix the radio. Emori has never paused to consider tech before, never had the time when she was scavenging for ALIE to think to pick it apart and attempt to figure out its inner workings, but the way the wires and coils and switchboards of the radio fit together is almost beautiful.

          “How does it work?” she asks Raven one day, and Raven looks up with a start, like she’d forgotten Emori was there. She has an ability to lose herself in her work that Emori envies, or maybe admires; she has never had the luxury of being able to focus so fully on one thing as Raven focuses on her mechanics.  
  
          “The radio?” Raven asks, and Emori nods. Raven slams the side of the thing against the heel of her palm a couple times, twists the metal antenna, and listens closely. Whatever it is she wants to hear, she must not hear it, because she sets the radio down on the table in front of her with a groan and spins her chair to face Emori. “Well, it doesn’t, at the moment. That’s why I’m trying to fix it.” She chuckles lightly at her own joke.

          “How is it supposed to work, then?”

          Raven leans back in her chair and looks Emori up and down. “You really wanna know?”

          “Why wouldn’t I?”

          “I mean, I didn’t think grounders were big on technology. No offense, but your whole religion … I mean, it’s misconstrued science.”

          “Grounders aren’t big on me, either” Emori says.    
  
          Raven’s gaze flickers to Emori’s gloved hand but, to her credit, she makes no comment on the  subject, opting instead for a shrug. “Fair enough. Okay. What do you want to know?”

          “Any of it,” Emori says, “all of it.”

          A grin spreads over Raven’s face at that, so thorough it fills her eyes with an almost manic light. “All right,” she says. “You asked for it.”

          What follows is at once the most bewildering and the most exhilarating three hours of Emori’s life. Raven is a passionate teacher, carried away sometimes by her own understanding of her subject, but always willing to do her best to slow down and repeat in layman’s terms when she rushes through an explanation full of descriptions of the relationships between mechanical bits and physical concepts Emori has never even heard of in isolation.

          They’re immersed in a diagram of Raven’s hasty design when Monty peers in from the hall. “Dinner’s ready … oh, Emori, hey. I was wondering where you’d gotten to; I can manage fine on my own, but I kinda missed the company in the kitchen.”

          Raven slings an arm around Emori’s shoulders, and Emori almost jumps at the casual contact. She likes Raven, admires Raven’s toughness and wit, is grateful beyond words to Raven for coming to her defense on the island, when the others wanted to use her as a guinea pig, but she has never been touched without ill will by anyone other than Otan or John before.

         “You’ll have to rope your girlfriend into it next time,” Raven says. “Emori’s mine now.” She turns to Emori, brow furrowed in sudden concern. “Assuming you’re into that, obviously,” she adds.

         “You’ll teach me?” Emori says. “The radio, the rocket, all of it?”

          “If you wanna learn,” Raven replies. “I’ve been waiting nineteen damn years for someone who does.”

          Emori nods, slowly, and Raven grins. Emori shoots Monty an apologetic look. “Sorry, Monty.”

          “Not at all,” Monty says, sounding inexplicably pleased. “I’m glad you’ve found your niche, Emori.”

          Raven’s smile makes Emori’s stomach flutter, and Monty’s acceptance warms her. Bellamy reminds her, in myriad ways, not all of which she can explain, of Otan, and Harper is the sister she never had. Even Echo is politer to her than she’d imagined any member of the coalition ever could be. 

           Her niche. It’s a new idea, but maybe she has.

***

          “John.”

          “Mm-hm?” John props himself on one elbow, looking up at Emori where she sits on her side of the bed, having just set the engineering manual Raven assigned her to read for homework facedown in her lap. “What is it, ‘Mori?”

          “I’ve been thinking.”  
  
          “What about?”

          “I want to try going without my glove.”

          John hauls himself into a sitting position and takes Emori’s hands in his own. She can’t quite read the look in his eyes. “Do you think it’s a good idea?” she asks, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest, the way her ribcage is clutched like a vice around her heart as she waits for his answer; she doesn’t want to think about what her anxiety might mean.

          But John doesn’t disappoint her; he never has. His normally guarded features bloom into a smile that reaches the startling blue eyes Emori could drown in, and he squeezes her hands, plants a kiss on her forehead. “I think it’s a great idea, ‘Mori,” he says, pressing his lips to each fingertip of her mutated hand with a tenderness that both makes her laugh and sends butterflies through her stomach. “And hey, if anyone fucks with you, I’ll take them.”

          “I’ll take them myself,” Emori tells him, rolling her eyes at the fists he holds up like he’s ready to square off and fight Echo or Harper or even Monty. “I thought you were  _ more of a lover, actually, _ John.”

          “Yeah, you’re right,” John grumbles, dropping his hands to take hers again. “But, I mean, it’s the thought that counts, right?”

          Emori kisses him, indulging for a moment in the feeling of his gentle lips against hers and in the way his nose brushes her cheek before pulling back to look seriously at him. “I don’t think there’ll be trouble. They’re good people,” she says.

          “…They are, aren’t they?” John says begrudgingly. Emori raises her eyebrows at him, and he relents. “Yeah,” he admits. “They’re good people. You’ll be fine.” He kisses her forehead, her nose, her mouth, and she wraps her arms around his narrow shoulders, pressing against him like he’s a door she desperately wants to keep from closing.  
  
          Assuming all goes well tomorrow, she can’t imagine how life could be more perfect.

***

          No one says anything at breakfast the next morning, but Emori can feel Raven’s eyes on her mutated hand as they work side by side after the meal, Raven on the radio and Emori on the flight simulation Raven has her running for the hundredth time – “practice makes perfect, Emori; you’ll be doing it well enough when you can do it in your sleep.” The scrutiny makes the hairs on her arms stand on end, and she remembers again why she always kept her hand covered on Earth; those who didn’t attack immediately at the sight of it invariably took it in with the hope of someday turning her status against her, using it to make her their puppet, their tool. It was what Baylis had done, and she still has the scars to show for it scattered across her body like so many dandelion seeds.

          “What are you looking at?” she asks finally, when she’s crashed the simulated rocket into the bay some seventy miles south of Polis. She can’t focus on a safe landing she might have to help make four years in the future with twenty years worth of well-honed instincts telling her to prepare for fight or flight _now_.  
  
          Raven looks up at Emori, then juts her chin to indicate Emori’s hand. “I hate to say the words, but Murphy’s right; it’s pretty badass.”

          Emori’s breath hitches; there’s a lump in her throat that she can’t quite explain and she feels, suddenly, almost like crying. “Do you think so?” she manages.  
  
          “On my honor,” Raven says.

          The words feel thick on her strangely clumsy tongue. “Thank you.”

          Raven shrugs. “I speak only the truth.” She glances over at Emori’s screen, where the remains of the animated rocket float in the animated water. “Now stop giving me the side eye like I’ve threatened to kill your puppy and get back to the simulation. Tell you what: land that rocket five more times today, and I’ll help you study for the external engineering safety test so you can come with me next time I need to take a spacewalk.”

          “I love you,” Emori deadpans.  
  
          “Of course you do, I’m awesome. Now. Simulation.”

          “Whatever you say,” Emori says, rolling her eyes but turning back to her keyboard and screen.

          “Computer, systems check.”

 

***

          “You ready?” Raven asks, tugging at Emori’s tether yet again to ensure Emori is properly strapped in for their spacewalk. Even within the thick cloth confines of her gloves, her fingers are deft; she’d told Emori the suits would feel bulky, and she clumsy, until they got out in the  _ zero-g _ environment of space, but she herself seems to move with almost as much grace as ever within the textile behemoth that, had Emori not seen her don it, she would have sworn had swallowed Raven whole.

          “I think so,” Emori manages, flexing her fingers to remind herself that they are still there, her body still hers. Raven raises an eyebrow. Emori takes a deep breath, reminding herself even as she tries for a moment of thoughtlessness that her tether means she is not on a limited supply of air, does not have to worry about using it up now and needing it later. _You’ve done more frightening_ , she tells herself. _You’ve trusted people_. _Space is nothing_. Breathe in, breathe out, the way Otan had taught her to keep herself quiet when she was small and scared and they needed to hide on short notice. She swallows hard and forces herself to slide her eyes to Raven’s. “Yes,” she says, “I’m ready.”  
  
          Behind the visor of her helmet, Raven grins, wide and radiant. “Damn right you are,” she says, punching Emori lightly in the shoulder. “You’ve studied with the best.”   
  
          “And the most modest.”

          “Shut up, Murphy.”

          Emori glances over at John and the others as Raven crosses to open the airlock. Bellamy, Monty, Harper, and Echo stand clustered together, the former three smiling encouraging smiles, Harper even offering a thumbs up, and Echo staring with a fierce and trepid curiosity at the airlock – Emori herself barely understands what it does, how it works, and she can imagine Echo is even more confused. John stands a little apart from the rest, scratching at the bridge of his nose the way he does when nervous and glancing back and forth between Emori and Raven with dark eyes that waver like the surface of a pond in an almost imperceptible breeze. As the doors slide open and Emori crosses to stand at Raven’s side, he calls out.  
  
          “Fuck this up and I’ll kill you, Reyes.”

          There’s no anger to John’s voice, no real threat, not like on Becca’s island when he swore to kill Clarke for sacrificing Emori to the nightblood injection and the radiation chamber, the idiot, forgetting his own life in his quest for reciprocity, but there’s no note of laughter to it, either, none of the teasing Emori has grown accustomed to listening to him and Raven throw back and forth. Raven pauses on the threshold of the airlock for a moment before turning to face him, arms crossed over her chest. “Chill, Murphy. We’ll be fine.”

          “You better be.”

          “I’m sure your concern is touching as always,” Bellamy says, and Raven snorts. After a moment, Emori hears John’s laughter as well, that dry, wry chuckle, and her muscles release the tension she hadn’t realized had built up in them since John had delivered his threat. Raven turns back around, steps into the airlock, and Emori follows her. Raven presses another button to close the doors; they seal with a sucking sound. Raven turns to Emori, gesturing at her for a moment before Emori realizes she’s supposed to turn on her comms, and then, after a crackle of static, speaks as if directly into Emori’s ear. 

          “Depressurization takes about five minutes and then we’re out in space,” she says. “How are you feeling?”

          She’s bristling with energy, a more positive adrenaline than has ever pulsed through her veins in her life. The stars she wished on as a child seem almost close enough to touch, there is nothing between her and them but the blue-black vastness (and, for five more minutes, the airlock’s outer set of thick glass doors). There’s a quivering lightness within her, spreading through her stomach, her chest, her limbs; it feels like fire, burning away all that has ever built up in her bones to hold her down. She nods at Raven, unable to find the words, and Raven laughs in her ear.

          “I was too excited to speak my first time, too.”  
  
          When their five minutes of depressurization are up and Raven presses the final button to eject them into space, it is as if Emori’s stomach drops out of her; the stars surround her, Earth below but by innumerable miles. The tether connecting her to the Ring falls from her mind; here, there is nothing but herself, and Raven, and a wild, incomprehensible sense of freedom.

***   


          John is waiting outside the airlock when they return, teeth digging into his lip and fingers curling and uncurling at his sides with a restless tension Emori has not seen in him before, and only a stern glance and a quick, sharp “don’t you dare” from Raven the moment the airlock doors open keep him from running to embrace Emori where she stands in her once-again bulky spacesuit; instead, he follows behind her and Raven at a distance of maybe half a dozen feet, and wraps Emori in his arms only once she has emerged, normally clothed once more, from the spare room nearest the airlock, which Raven had designated spacewalk prep within their first weeks on the Ring. The ferocity of his embrace, the way he nearly crushes her ribs in the cocoon of his arms, is not alien to her, but she has not felt it in years, not since Clarke injected herself with the nightblood in Becca’s lab and saved Emori’s life. “Emori,” he murmurs, his mouth just below her ear, where her jaw meets her neck, “thank god.”  
  
          Tentatively, Emori wraps her arms around John; he melts into her like they’ve spent far longer than five hours apart. When he releases her, she pulls back and takes a moment to study his face – there’s blood on his mouth from where he’s chewed through the skin of his lip, and unshed tears glisten in his eyes. “John?” she says. “Are you all right?”

          John shoots Raven a look Emori can’t quite grasp the depths of; Raven says something sudden and transparent about “going to tell Bellamy the hull problem is fixed” and sets off towards the mess hall. John just stares at Emori like she’s some sort of ghost, and she watches his chest rise and fall for a moment before she speaks. “Do you want to go to dinner, John, or back to our room?”

          “Room,” John says. Something in her sinks at his response – the food is awful, but laughing and talking with the others, playing charades and “never have I ever” with them after the dishes have been washed and put away is not – but she shakes it off with hardly a second thought, follows him silently down the hall to the room they share. She watches from the doorway as he falls onto the foot of the bed. He won’t look at her, but she can tell from the way his shoulders shake, the way he buries his face in his hands, that he is muffling sobs.   
  
          “John,” she says, coming into the room. The door swings closed behind her. “John, what’s wrong? Did something happen while I was out with Raven?”  
  
          He shakes his head. She hears a shaky “no” from behind the heels of John’s palms.

          “What’s wrong, John?” she repeats. She huffs out a half-laugh, attempts to defuse with humor the way she’s seen him do. It’s not her preferred mask for pain, but it is his, and clearly there is some pain in him to which he refuses to give words. “The way you nearly suffocated me back there, you’d have thought you thought you’d never see me again.”

          He looks up at her, and his eyes are red and empty. His voice is hollow when he speaks. “The last time someone I love stepped into that airlock, they didn’t come back out.”  
  
          His father. Of course. Her heart rends.

          She comes to sit beside him on the bed, drapes her left arm over his shoulders; he takes her large hand in his, squeezes, and she presses him closer to her side.“The universe won’t take me from you without one hell of a fight, John,” she says. “And honestly,  I think I’d win.”

          John musters a laugh and then buries his face in her shoulder, his tears dampening the fabric of her sleeve. He turns into her, and she wraps her arms around him, rubbing circles into his upper back with her right hand and pulling him as tightly to her as she can with her left. “Shh, John, shh,” she murmurs, resting her chin atop his head. “I’m here. I’m fine.”   
  
          John pulls back, wiping his damp eyes with the back of his hand. “You are,” he says, his words watery, and he takes her hands in his, squeezing for a moment as if to test the veracity of his statement, as if to reassure himself of her presence. “And I’m an idiot. How was the spacewalk?”

          “Are you all right?” she asks instead of answering. Guilt knots her stomach at the idea of rambling on if he isn’t. But he nods, squeezes her hands again, and manages a small smile that warms her from the inside out. 

          “You’re here. I’m fine.  You enjoyed it, right? So … tell me about it.”  

          There are tears in her eyes, now, and trailing down her cheeks, not the relief of John’s but pure awe at the fact that he is hers. “God, John,” she says. “It was  _ incredible _ .”

***

          When Emori goes limp beneath the pressure of Harper’s knee digging into her stomach, the weight of Harper’s forearm pressed across her clavicle, Harper’s face breaks into a satisfied grin, and Emori, sensing the lowering of Harper’s defenses, tenses the muscles of her stomach in preparation to spring again.  _ Ge smak daun, gyon op nodotaim  _ – a lesson they all learned on the ground, but none better than those whose only options were to be slaughtered in their villages or to flee and wander a desert named for killing those who dared attempt to cross it. She can’t wait to see the look on Harper’s face when the tables turn, when it becomes Emori’s calves bracketing Harper’s thighs and Emori’s hands bearing down on Harper’s chest, forcing her into defeat. 

          “Hey.”

          Harper rolls off of Emori, but Emori, too, has turned her face upward to where Raven stands in the doorway, tossing aside the most golden opportunity for a comeback with which she’s ever been presented. Raven smiles, leans against the door frame with what would appear to the casual observer to be pure and simple ease, but there’s a crease between her eyebrows, a glassiness to her eyes, that Emori recognizes as signs that Raven’s mind is elsewhere, on a problem she is determined but doesn’t know how to fix.

          “Hey,” Emori says, keeping her voice laid back even as she tries to make Raven meet her gaze. Raven locks eyes with her for an instant, but she won’t be kept; her pupils flit as ceaselessly as if she’s spasming, the way John did just before the first batch of Monty’s algae sent him under, into the turbulence of dreams that still shadow his eyes sometimes; though he’s never told her precisely what he saw in them, she knows his history, and can imagine. Emori glances across the room to where Echo stands, observing as she always does the spars of others, but the spy has relaxed on the Ring, or perhaps merely not spent enough time with Raven to know her, and the gaze she lays on Raven gives away no suspicion of secrecy. “Raven. What’s up?” 

          Raven shakes herself out of thoughts, glances down at Emori; her face softens into a real smile for a moment, one that sets off a small swarm of butterflies in Emori’s stomach, before she addresses the group. “Monty sent me to tell you all lunch is ready. Three guesses what’s on the menu, but hey, at least it isn’t poisoning anyone anymore.”

          Harper lets out a huff of laughter, but when Emori shoots her a look, she silences with a quick nod of apology.  She knows as well as any of them that it’s a sensitive subject; any reference to the state in which the algae put John when he volunteered to be the first to try it sends Emori rocketing back to those early days, when John had been all she trusted in the world and so close to falling away from her forever. She thinks of it now. The pale cast of his skin, the dampness of his brow, had knotted her stomach, and every shallow rise and fall of his chest had sent a pang of fear through her worse than any she’d felt before, because what could she do to combat this threat? John was headed the only place she couldn’t follow, except she would follow, wouldn’t she, if he were to go, if her tie to his people were to be severed? It was only at John’s bedside that Monty had been the second of John’s people, after Raven on Beca’s island, to make Emori feel in any sense safe. He had come up beside her, and, in that candid manner of his she found herself admiring had promised her that even if the worst were to happen, if John were to die, they would treat her as one of their own.  _ You really turned him around _ , Monty had said, and she’d wanted to say  _ he turned me around, too _ , but instead she’d smiled and thanked him and he’d smiled back and said it was the least they could do; clearly she was  _ a hell of a girl _ .

          “Em?” Raven says, and Emori looks up to see Echo and Harper standing by the door with Raven, all three of them watching her with pursed lips and furrowed brows. “You good?”

          “Yeah,” Emori says, shaking her head to clear it. “Yeah, I’m fine, thanks.”

          Raven crosses the room and offers her hand to help Emori up, dismissing the others with a quick “go on. We’ll catch up.”

          Harper offers Emori an apologetic smile and she and Echo head off in the direction of the mess hall. Emori takes Raven’s hand and uses Raven’s help to haul herself back to her feet. “Thanks,” she says as she stands, and Raven offers her that smile that is so much softer than Emori had ever suspected her capable of before they’d come to know each other on the Ring. There’s a burden to it, though, lingering heavy in Raven’s eyes.

          “What’s wrong?” Emori asks.

          Raven deflates. Emori recognizes the way some of the weight lifts from her eyes, the way some of the tension goes from her shoulders, as she releases the lie that everything is fine. There is a certain heft to dishonesty. Emori herself carried it for so long that her bones ache like those of a much older woman from the pressure that bore down on her for years, so constant she hadn’t been conscious of its presence until it had finally begun to lift in space.

          “A lot,” Raven says, after a moment. “Can you come to the workshop after lunch?”

          “Of course,” Emori says. “Same as always.”

          “No. Like, right after lunch. I have something I need to tell you.”

          “Can’t you tell me now? Or can it wait the extra couple hours?” 

          It is the one tradition Emori has, the one real tradition of the Dead Zone: the two or three hours’ rest after high noon, squirreled away from the worst of the day’s heat in whatever facsimile of shade one could find. Although the temperature here is no different at what they have designated noon than at what they have designated midnight, it adds to their structure and gives them the time they desperately need to retire to their rooms and be away from each other. It is the one time John will talk, these days; it used to be he’d sit in the workshop in the afternoons while Raven and Emori labored, cracking jokes and making Emori laugh and Raven roll her eyes, used to be he’d join in on dinner conversations and after-dinner games, but now he stays in their room whenever he can and eats his meals in silence, and will be readying for bed by the time Emori returns in the evenings, with only a few words exchanged before his head hits the pillow and his breathing slows. Emori tries not to think about his reclusion, but she treasures that daily handful of hours when she can curl up in bed with John, chest to chest, arms around each other, and talk of what they miss most about the Earth and what they’re going to do when they return. He’ll tell her what movies he’s been watching while she’s been sparring with Harper and Echo and she’ll tell him what she’s learned about Azgeda and Skaikru combat and it will feel… right, normal, like something she could settle into a life with.

          “I don’t want to spoil your lunch. And I really can’t put it off any longer than that.” Raven looks down at her feet. “I’m sorry, Em,” she says. “Believe me, I wish I could think of a better time to do this. But I don’t think there’s really any good time for the conversation we have to have. If there were, I’d have found it in the months I’ve been putting off having it with you.” 

          Raven’s laugh is like horseradish, which John had used once in a recipe on Becca’s island before he’d perfected his skills as a chef, bitter and grating. Emori nods. Whatever Raven needs.  
  
          “All right. I’ll come with you to the workshop after lunch.”

          Raven musters up another smile. “Thanks,” she says. “You’re the best second a girl could ask for, Em.”

          That title Emori would have been denied on Earth, had she ever aspired to it, warms her belly like a good fire, but not quite enough to chase away the nausea that has settled there in anticipation of whatever Raven has to tell her.

***

          The meaning of the charts on the screen before Emori’s eyes sinks in slowly. It is a sensation akin to being suddenly submerged in ice-cold water: a sharp shock at the moment of realization, as the switch flicks and the light bulb appears over her head and the signals of the sensory neurons reach the brain, and then a gradual dulling, a growing heaviness in the limbs as the ramifications of the information sink in, the lungs filling with liquid and the body habituating to its freezing new home. “Raven,” she says deliberately, hoping the halting pace of her words will give Raven a chance to stop her, to tell her she’s wrong. Beside her, Raven wrings her hands and worries her lower lip with her teeth and says nothing. “Fuck, Raven. How long have you known?” 

          “While,” Raven says. She comes up behind Emori, leans over with her chest pressed to Emori’s back and takes the computer mouse, scrolling to highlight another window in the bottom corner of the screen and blowing it up to full size – a variation on the same chart dated April 18th, 2150 – just shy of three weeks, she knows now, after they’d fled Praimfaya for the Ring. “I knew even before then; technically speaking, I knew before we even left the ground. I said as much when Clarke suggested we go back into space to escape Praimfaya. But desperate times call for desperate measures, you know? It was five-year problem.”

          “And four and a half years haven’t been enough to figure it out.”

          “No.”  
  
          “How long have you known they wouldn’t be?”  
  
          “Not quite as long, but … a while. Three years now, maybe? A little less?”  
  
          “And you didn’t tell anyone?”   
  
          The numbness that had overtaken Emori’s voice, settled into her chest, her limbs, when she’d started to make sense of the charts on the screen has begun to give way to a roiling anger. There is a certain righteousness to it, she tries to convince herself, which would be true if she were angry at Raven for her failure to find a way to return them all to Earth – Emori doesn’t care for the planet or its people the way John or Bellamy or even Echo do – but it is not that failure that bubbles like lava in Emori’s stomach and stings the corners of her eyes with hot tears. It is, rather, that Raven has kept this secret from her for three long years; that, for three long years, Raven has not trusted Emori to work by her side as Emori swore she would when Raven took her on as an apprentice.  
  
          “What would be the point to depriving them all of a few extra years of hope?”  
  
          “ _Fuck_ hope,” Emori says, spinning around and forcing Raven to take several steps back from the desk. Her nails dig into her palms as she makes fists to keep herself from crying; she can feel them draw blood from the soft flesh of her right palm. “You should have told _me_. I’m your second; it’s my job to help you with these things. But I can’t help for shit if you don’t trust me enough to tell me anything.” Despite herself, her voice rises as she speaks until she’s almost shouting the words.  
  
          Raven looks struck. “It’s not about trust, Em,” she says, and Emori has studied people long enough to hear the tremor in her voice despite her best attempts to hide it. “If I can’t even help myself, then how could I expect anyone else to help me? You’re an amazing mechanic, even better than I was on the amount of training you’ve had, but if this were something that could be solved, I would have solved it already, believe me.”

          “You should have at least let me try!”  
  
          “I’m letting you try now.”

          That stops Emori. She takes several deep, shuddering breaths, willing the tears and the rage back down to where she keeps them stockpiled like weapons in case of emergency. “I thought you’d given up,” she says, doing the best she can to keep her voice level.

          “I did,” Raven says. She wrings her hands. “But I’d feel like shit if I didn’t give it a last push. And I want your help.”

          “Took you long enough to figure that out,” Emori mutters.

          “Maybe,” Raven admits. She looks out at the room, refusing to meet the gaze Emori knows she must be able to feel on her, and speaks again. “I don’t like asking for help. Ask anyone. And I’m not used to having people who can give it when it comes to this stuff. People think Monty and I can talk tech to each other, but computers and rockets don’t have shit in common. There’ve been maybe two people in my life … dead, both of them.”

          “That happens a lot,” Emori says. “Death.”

          “Yeah,” Raven agrees.

          They stand like that in silence for a moment before Emori relents. She spent far too long with people whose value of her was conditional on her usefulness and compliance to feel at ease testing limits with any of this group who have accepted her and her hand without question or stipulation. “I’ll help,” she says. “Let’s get ourselves back down.”

          The smile that breaks across Raven’s face is like a sunrise. She nods sharply, comes up behind Emori again, and begins to walk her through the various solutions that won’t work – “once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is worth a fucking try,” she says, and, as much as Emori hopes they find the improbable, for John’s sake and for Bellamy’s and for Echo’s, nothing she ever felt on Earth gave her quite as much a sense of home as does Raven’s chest to her back and Raven’s hand over hers as they pore over charts in hopes of finding a way back to the ground.

***

          Lying has always come easily to Emori, and, although she hasn’t had much cause to practice the art of deception in recent years, she is proud to see that night at dinner that her skills have not rusted over from lack of use. The moment Raven opens the evening’s conversation with a comment about a plot hole in the movie they watched last week, some black and white foreign drama featuring no fewer than three torrid affairs, two deaths from tuberculosis, and one fatal miscommunication, Emori receives the implicit message: the others can’t know about the problem of reentry. Not now. Not yet. It niggles at her a bit, to conceal things from her family like this, but she reminds herself of Raven’s reasoning: the other option would be to cause her family pain, anguish they certainly needn’t feel now, with six months left before it’s even safe to return to the planet below, and might never need feel if only she and Raven can figure out a way back quickly enough. So she follows along with Raven’s rant, nodding and humming her assent, gently teases Bellamy for his emphatic defense of “experimental art,” gets jokingly defensive in turn when Monty, the only one aside from Bellamy to enjoy those old foreign films (although this one was a little much even for him, he admits), comes after her and Raven for being co-conspirators in all they do. “Best friends attached at the hip, I know how it is,” he says, “but you’ve gotta use that power for good, not to roast Bellamy for his film preferences.”

           “Roasting Bellamy for his film preferences is good, for everyone else who has to watch them with him,” Raven retorts. “Emori and I are doing a public service. Right Harper? Echo? … Murphy?”

           “Don’t drag us into this,” Harper says, and Echo nods her agreement. John says nothing. The years in space, Emori realizes suddenly, have dulled the blue fire of his eyes, and she is overwhelmed by the desire to follow him back to their room after dinner instead of staying for go fish or poker or charades, to press him into the mattress with her larger hand resting on his throat the way that blows his pupils wide and to ride him until his eyes are too dark to be dull and she sees sparks like that erstwhile fire behind her own eyelids as she clenches around him and finds her climax. But she can’t give away that anything is different from the day before, so she draws her eyes away from John as he clears his bowl and retreats from the mess hall with a mumbled goodbye the moment Harper, the slowest eater, finishes her meal. She helps Monty and Echo wash, dry, and put away dishes, laughing at their conversation without contributing anything of her own, and wins the next day off chores at a game of gin rummy, almost failing to realize her victory until Raven points in out and she remembers she’s supposed to react. It is nearing what they all decided early on is midnight by the time she makes her way back to the room she shares with John.

          “Hey,” he says as she enters and slips out of her shoes. He’s lying on the bed and staring up at the ceiling, and doesn’t even glance in her direction as he speaks to her. When she comes over and sits down on her side of the bed, however, he swivels into a sitting position and wraps his arms around her waist. 

          Emori leans her head back on John’s shoulder to look up at him through her eyelashes. “Hey,” she returns. The secret she now carries still sits heavy as a stone in her stomach, like the boulders she’d once seen Baylis tie to the limbs of a would-be defector before tossing the terrified man into the bay and letting him sink like a bag of meat, but John’s touch has always soothed her, always melted away the tension she’s carried in her shoulders, her thighs, her face, and even now the feeling of his clever fingers against her belly, his bony jaw against her cheek, slacken her. “Hey,” she says again, turning her head to press a kiss to his chin and laughing lightly as his stubble scratches her lips.

          “Are you okay?”

          She looks up at him. His furrowed brow and downturned lips are etched with a concern akin to the one that’s been growing in her for him this past year or so, the one she’s never voiced because she knows how he feels about pity. “I’m fine,” she says, hoping she sounds it. “Why do you ask?”

          “You went off with Raven right after lunch. And you seemed even more in synch with her than usual at dinner, like you were in on something together, just the two of you.”

          She knows she’d taught John how to read people (how to hone his natural talent for it, really, so that he could persuade and intimidate rather than just spit tailored poison), but she’d carefully made sure she’d never taught him to read her. He wouldn’t need to; she wouldn’t lie to him unless for some reason she needed to to save his life. Perhaps she has gotten somewhat rusty from lack of practice. Still, she schools her expression into one she feels confident emanates sincerity before she speaks.  
  
          “I wouldn’t hide from you, John. You know that. I’m fine, really. Just tired.”

          “What did Raven want you for after lunch?”  
  
          “Double-check some calculations for reentry in April,” Emori says, hoping she sounds casual despite the lump in her throat that threatens to swallow her whole.

          “Raven ‘I thought I was wrong once but I was mistaken’ Reyes? Asking to have her work double checked?” John snorts. Emori thinks she’s blown it for a second before he adds, “I’m never going to let her live that down.”

          “Don’t mention it to her,” Emori says quickly. John looks down at her with his brow quirked, and the lie spins from her tongue with as much ease as a lie ever has. “She trusted me as her second to double-check her work, but also not to tell anybody she asked to have it double-checked. I don’t want to betray her trust.”

          “You don’t want her to know you betrayed her trust,” John corrects. Emori wants to kiss the smirk that spreads across his lips, both because he is so beautiful and because she needs this conversation to end, but her stomach tosses like she’s about to vomit. She sits up suddenly, and John drops his arms from around her waist.  
  
          “Bathroom,” she chokes out. “Goodnight, John.”

          “Goodnight,” he calls after her, confused, as she shuts the bathroom door behind her.

          She doesn’t return to bed that night, opting instead to turn on the sink and let the faucet run so John can’t hear her cry.

***

         As they head into what Monty, Harper, Bellamy, Echo, and John still believe is their final month in space, conversation aboard the Ring turns more and more overwhelmingly towards one topic: the return to Earth, and what everyone is going to do when they get there. From the way they all bubble over with excitement, the sheer number of ideas they all offer up of what they’ll do the moment their feet hit the ground, Emori feels as though they must have been operating under an unspoken agreement these past few years not to talk about what they couldn’t have, an agreement which has broken like a floodgate now that they can count the days until they plan to return on their fingers and toes. Even John emerges somewhat from the shell to which he has retreated, helping Monty and Harper on the farm in the mornings and Monty in the kitchen in the afternoons and sitting with them all around the table in the mess hall after supper as they play “On Which Planet Would You Rather?” Each answer of “Earth” hisses in Emori’s stomach, causes her to cross the fingers of her right hand behind her back in silent prayer that no one will catch the glances she exchanges with Raven.  
  
          “We can’t put off telling them much longer,” Emori says one afternoon, leaning back in her chair with a sigh when yet another combination of radio settings fails to contact the Earth. “Unless we’re planning to break it to them when they show up at the loading dock with their things next Friday.”

          “We’ll tell them before then,” Raven promises. “It’s just …” She lets out a long huff of air, turns in her chair by the computer to face Emori from across the room. “I’m scared, Em. I’m selfish and I’m scared. I promised everyone I’d get them home and time is almost up and we’re still stuck and I really don’t want to know how they’ll react.”

          “Time’s not up until either we give up or we die,” Emori says. “ _ Yu  _ _ gonplei nou ste odon  _ and all that.” She pictures Bellamy’s determined expression whenever he talks about his responsibility to his sister, Monty’s set tone as he explains how he owes it to his friend to make Earth somewhere liveable, somewhere good. “Maybe one of them will even have a new idea,” she says.

          “None of them know shit about astronautics,” Raven points out.

          “Like knowing shit about astronautics has helped us so far.”

          Raven sighs. “Fair point,” she says.

          Emori looks over at Raven. Her hair is greasy from lack of washing, and the bags beneath her eyes are heavy and dark even against the tawny of her skin – she’s been sacrificing sleep in hope of finding a solution. Guilt has settled into the lining of Emori’s stomach so much over the past few months that it’s begun to feel like a part of her, but the pang that works its way through her as she takes in Raven’s dishevelment is novel. Her heart aches for her friend.

          “I’ll do it tonight,” Raven says. “After dinner.” Then, “you’ll be there for me if it all goes sideways, right?”

          “Always, Raven” Emori says. 

          She tries not to picture the way John’s face will fall when the news breaks, the way all their faces will fall. But she does anyway.

***   


          The moment Harper sets down her spoon, signaling the end of the evening meal and the transition into clean-up and then into after-dinner games, Raven stands up, her own spoon and bowl in hand, and clangs the one against the other to garner the attention of the others. It takes longer than it should in a group of seven; they are all so accustomed to the way things go now, Emori supposes, to the way things have gone for over four years, that they simply cannot process the possibility of a post-meal announcement. 

          (Announcements, all of birthdays and holidays and milestones in space, have always taken place before dinner, but Raven didn’t want to sit and eat a meal with her friends right after breaking their hearts.)  
  
          “As I assume you all know,” Raven begins once five sets of eyes have settled on her, “it’s been four years, eleven months, and three weeks since Praimfaya.” Emori takes a moment to study the other members of their family – Bellamy, barely daring to breathe in his anticipation, Harper, smiling expectantly, Monty, furrowed brow and frowning lips already offering a silent goodbye to the Ring, Echo, as inscrutable as ever even to Emori’s keen insight, and John, gaze fixed on Raven with such an intensity Emori imagines she can see the fire running through his veins. They are none of them prepared for what Raven has to tell them.  
  
          “As I believe you’re also aware,” Raven continues, her voice surprisingly strong and steady given the circumstances, “the calculations Monty and I did in the months leading up to the end of the world as we knew it predicted that it would take five years for radiation levels on Earth to become survivable again. We’ve been tracking the planet’s progress, and it’s looking like our predictions were right. It should be safe to go back down in about a week.”

          There is a release of tension in the room as Bellamy exhales, Harper squeals, and John mutters “about damn time” with the biggest smile Emori’s seen on his face in years. He tries to meet her eyes, but she finds herself seeking Raven’s.  _ Settle them down _ , she tells Raven silently. She understands the desire to stall, but leading them to believe that Earth is a definite and immediate yes with her opening will only make things worse when she gets the truth out. Raven gives her a small nod and clangs her spoon against her bowl again.

          “I’m not done,” she says. “That was the good news. The bad news is that we won’t be going back.”

          Emori would’ve expected an outcry here even bigger than the initial outcry of reinforced belief, but the silence that follows Raven’s confession feels heavier, sharper as it needles its way into her skin, than shouts and accusations ever could. By the way Raven’s breath hitches, the way she slowly sets down her spoon and bowl so she doesn’t drop them from her trembling hands, she can tell Raven feels the same. “I told you when Clarke declared we were going up instead of back that there wasn’t enough fuel to get us back  _ from _ going up, but we agreed that was a five-year problem. It’s been five years. It’s still a problem. I can’t figure out a solution to it.”

          “Aren’t solutions your job?” Bellamy asks, his voice harsher than Emori has ever heard it. She nearly jumps out of her skin, realizing for the first time that Bellamy shares a rumbling timbre with Baylis, may he rot in the earth. Bellamy stands, casting a shadow across Emori where she sits beside him. “You’re a mechanic, and a damn good one, or so I’ve heard,” he says. “Mechanics fix things. Fix it.”  
  
          Raven bites down on her lower lip; Emori can see the tears she’s trying to keep from falling. Her only response to Bellamy’s demand is a shake of the head.  
  
          “Fix what?” Emori says. She’s on her feet before she knows it, and she can feel the moment her family catches up, their eyes latching on to her. Only the dejection on Raven’s face keeps her from crumpling. “Nothing is broken; the rocket’s as good as new. We just don’t have the fuel we need. Or the materials to make more of it. Or a chemist, even if we had the materials.”

          “Fix the problem,” Bellamy says, turning to her with an ease that suggests he’s not surprised she knew. “If we don’t have the fuel, figure out some other way to get back down to Earth.”

          “We’ve been trying!” Emori says. 

          “We?” she hears John ask. She makes the mistake of glancing over at him, and he looks away from her quickly, which only compounds the heartbreak that cuts through her like a bolt of lightning at the sight of his kicked-pup expression.

          “Try harder,” Bellamy says, releasing himself into his seat.

          The others start to talk then. Emori hears Echo ask “so we’re not going back?” and Monty reply “not next week, we aren’t” and Harper say “I just wish you’d told us, Raven” in that tone that means well but that Emori knows must make Raven, as stubbornly independent as she is, bristle. When Harper reaches out across the table to lay a hand on Raven’s shoulder, Raven turns on her heel and flees from the room. Emori catches the glisten of tears tracking down her cheeks only because she knows what to look for, but catch it she does; she takes off after her friend, only looking behind her once before she leaves the mess hall to see that John has turned to face the wall, closing himself off from everyone but most especially from her.

***   


          When Emori finally returns to the room she shares with John, leaving Raven snoring gently beneath her top sheet, tears finally drying into sticky streaks across her cheeks, it is nearing three in the morning and she has nearly forgotten the reason Raven required comforting in the first place – forgotten, at least, the way that reason had made her stomach feel like it was inside out and filled with writhing worms. But she remembers quickly enough when she tries the door handle, only to find it as stubborn as a mutant who spent the first twenty years of her life in a place called the Dead Zone, refusing to die. 

          “John?” she calls, just loudly enough to make herself heard through the thick metal of the door, and then, when a moment passes without response, “ _ John? _ ” louder and higher-pitched as her heart clenches in a way it hasn’t in years, not since his coma, and, before that, since his capture by those traders from Polis who had sold him to the Flamekeeper and the false Commander. She tries to keep her pulse from spiking, her hands from shaking, her wits from fleeing her – she knows his person and his past, knows he  _ wouldn’t _ , but then again, he has become almost a stranger to her on the Ring, the dullness of his eyes seeping into the bones of his face, the way he moves, and making her worry for him almost as much as she loves him. “John, are you there? Open the door!”

          “Go away, Emori.”

          It would occur to someone else, perhaps, to worry for her the way she worries for him at how those words, venomous as they are, cease the flow of adrenaline through her bloodstream. It takes a full minute for her heart to begin to curl in on itself like paper in a fire as the meaning of the words, more than just the fact that he is there and capable of speech, begins to sink in.

          “Are you – what’s wrong, John?”

          “I’ll handle it myself.”

          “Did you lock the door?”

          “What about it?”

          “Let me in, John,” she says, rattling the door handle. It occurs to her that she could go to the workshop, find a paper clip, jiggle it in the latch, but if he doesn’t want her, she tells herself, that’s fine. If he no longer trusts her (perhaps she seems as much a stranger to him as he does to her, although she hasn’t stopped  _ trusting  _ him, stopped  _ loving _ him, has she?), if he no longer feels he can tell her things he would otherwise keep to himself as they ate away at him, it is fine. She will make do, as she did before, only this time she will have a family by her side (even it’s missing a member, a blot in family photograph behind her whose former presence is evidenced only by the phantom sensation of arms around her waist and a tinge of bitter melancholy to her laughs). “Because I live here, if nothing else.”

         “Plenty of other cells in this prison. Find your own.”

_           I live with  _ you, she thinks. 

          “If you’re going to be a child about it, I will,” she says. “It’s no one’s fault we’re not going down next week, John. If you want to hurry it up, help us brainstorm solutions.”

          “Quit moralizing and go away. Don’t waste your valuable time on me.”

          “My time  _ is _ valuable,” she protests. She’s glad, now, that she’s not in the room with him, because it would seem he’d no longer care about the hot tears that slip from her eyes and burn their way down her cheeks.

          She gets tired of waiting for him to respond, eventually, and finds herself a spare blanket and a corner of the ship where she can sleep with her face to a floor-to-ceiling window looking away from the Earth and her back to a wall. The feeling of sleeping seated and curled in on herself, and, with it, of sleeping with half an eye open to danger, comes back with remarkable ease, almost as if she hadn’t spent five and a half years sharing a bed and a heart with someone else. 

***

          (He comes to her in the morning, wakes her for breakfast and apologizes and tells her he knows it’s not her fault they’re trapped and he appreciates that she’s doing what she can. She calls him an idiot and folds him into her arms and tells him he can always come to her. He says he knows. She thinks, maybe, he tries. She can see a struggle in his eyes sometimes, like he’s about to speak, before he collapses in on himself again.

          Their tenuous resolution lasts all of two and a half weeks.)

***

          Their last fight begins, as fights of its caliber so often do, over something stupid, something she knows even as they spew vitriol at each other they won’t remember in a week’s time. It begins with something stupid, something that has nothing even to do with the way he won’t let her in anymore – a punishment, she thinks, for her having found a place on the Ring and his resenting it – but it ends with the cards scattered across the table like the Big Bad Wolf has blown their house down. It ends with his suggesting he leave, since “clearly she can’t stand the sight of him,” with her ignoring the way something in his eyes breaks when she says not to bother, she’ll do the leaving for him, with the guilt the bubbles and hisses in her stomach at the relief that courses through her as she realizes she’s walking out for good this time. It ends at two in the morning with her standing in front of Raven’s door, teary-eyed but lighter than she’s felt in months, hoping selfishly that Raven is having one of her nights when she can’t sleep because she thinks John has turned to stalking the hallway – she heard a scream, a crash, the open-and-shut swing of a door behind her as she walked away – and she can’t bear the idea of sharing space with him right now.

          She knocks on Raven’s door, and it must be one of those nights because the door opens for her and there’s Raven, leaning against the door frame in her pajamas and looking far more awake than anyone should at the late hour. Her eyes widen as she takes in Emori’s face. “Oh, shit,” she murmurs. “Shit, Em. Come in.”

          She shepherds Emori over to her bed and sits down with her at its foot, arm around Emori’s shoulders. Emori is too tired to be proud. She wraps her arms around Raven’s waist and buries her face in Raven’s shoulder, trying not to think about how she smells like John – they all smell like each other, after five and a half years of eating the same food and using the same soap. Raven rubs her shoulder, saying nothing until Emori’s tears have died down and she’s pulled back from Raven, wiping at her tear-streaked cheeks with the back of her right hand as if she could conceal the fact that she’s been crying without a dozen cloths soaked in cold water pressed against the redness of her eyes.

          “Emori,” Raven says gently, hand still on Emori’s shoulder. “What happened?”

          Emori wipes at her nose with the back of her hand and Raven stands, limps over to her dresser and returns with a box of tissues. Emori takes one, blows her nose, takes another to catch the few tears still falling. She’s surprised her tear ducts haven’t run out. “We ended it,” she says. Her voice shakes. “ _ I  _ ended it. With John.”

          “For good this time?” Raven asks. Emori hasn’t come to her like this before. She’s either come angry or cried herself to sleep in the hall each time she’s fought with John.

          Emori nods. “I think so,” she says. “I can’t … I don’t think I can take any more of what it’s been like lately, trying to love him.”

          “I’ve been there before,” Raven says.

          “What did you do?”

          “Slept with Bellamy.”

          Emori wrinkles her nose. 

          “It’s not for everyone,” Raven admits. “And honestly, it didn’t really help.”

          “What did?” 

          “Nothing. I loved Finn till the day he died. I still … a part of me still loves him, even though I know he worked damn hard not to deserve it.”

          “Fuck,” Emori says.

          “It bites. I wish I had something helpful to say, some advice to offer, but reality is it fucking sucks.”

          “And we mechanics can’t fix a broken heart?”

           Raven laughs. “I  _ wish _ .”

          “I can’t go back there,” Emori says. “Our quarters, I mean. There’s too much there. He left right after me, but …” she shudders. There are too many memories, five and a half years of love and struggle, thick in the air of that room; thick enough, she suspects, to choke on. 

          “You can stay here,” Raven says. “We can pull another bed in in the morning, but for now we can share.” 

          She lies down. Emori looks back at her, hesitancy forming a lump in the back of her throat. She’s never shared a bed with anyone but John before.

          Raven props herself up on one elbow. “I haven’t been sleeping tonight,” she admits. “You’d be doing me a favor, too, giving me a little extra body heat and something to hold on to.”

          Emori settles into a lying-down position facing Raven. It feels odd, to be so close to someone who isn’t the man she loves, but there is an undeniable comfort in the warmth radiating from Raven’s body, the way Raven wraps her arms around Emori’s waist when Emori rolls over, back to Raven’s chest. There is an undeniable comfort to Raven’s slow, deep breathing as she searches for sleep, her slow, rolling snores when she finds it. Emori closes her eyes and feels Raven’s weight against her like an anchor. Perhaps she has lost something valuable. Perhaps she will never find it again. But there is a voice at the back of her mind that tells her she has done right, and the voice sounds like Raven, and Bellamy, and Monty, and Harper, and Echo, all embracing her as though it is in their hearts, in their family, that she truly belongs.

**Author's Note:**

> One day you finally knew  
> what you had to do, and began,  
> though the voices around you  
> kept shouting  
> their bad advice --  
> though the whole house  
> began to tremble  
> and you felt the old tug  
> at your ankles.  
> "Mend my life!"  
> each voice cried.  
> But you didn't stop.  
> You knew what you had to do,  
> though the wind pried  
> with its stiff fingers  
> at the very foundations,  
> though their melancholy  
> was terrible.  
> It was already late  
> enough, and a wild night,  
> and the road full of fallen  
> branches and stones.  
> But little by little,  
> as you left their voice behind,  
> the stars began to burn  
> through the sheets of clouds,  
> and there was a new voice  
> which you slowly  
> recognized as your own,  
> that kept you company  
> as you strode deeper and deeper  
> into the world,  
> determined to do  
> the only thing you could do --  
> determined to save  
> the only life that you could save.
> 
> -Mary Oliver, The Journey


End file.
